Ahrefs Domain Metrics... zero organic traffic?

[ScreamingMidget]

I'm seeing sites that for example have 90,000+ backlinks, a RD of 36 (reasonable), over 900 referring domains, yet 22 organic keywords, but 0 organic traffic.

Ahrefs rank around the 2 million mark.

That seems strange - anybody any idea why it's so low with quite a decent amount of referring domains? Is it something that should raise a flag?

 

[SamLewis]

Check the referring domains. I bought an auction domain way back when I first started which had thousands of backlinks and pretty good metrics so didn't check the referring domains.
After I bought it I lost pretty much all backlinks so checked why and turned out that the domain was used for a tumblr blog and most of the backlinks came from tumblr.

 

[ScreamingMidget]

Check the referring domains. I bought an auction domain way back when I first started which had thousands of backlinks and pretty good metrics so didn't check the referring domains.
After I bought it I lost pretty much all backlinks so checked why and turned out that the domain was used for a tumblr blog and most of the backlinks came from tumblr.

I've just checked another site with hardly any organic traffic and it has over 153,000 from a site that is full of Arabic writing and a shite design. The problem is, Ahrefs gives is a decent DR and lowish Rank, so it's definitely important to go further beneath the surface.

What else do you look for to determine if a site is showing decent ratings, but falsely?

Anchors can sometimes give it away if a site has a lot of links with anchor text thats nothing to do with the domain subject.

 

[Micoli]

You need to make more deep analysis to understand the reasons. Firstly you need how is optimized the website maybe the content is fully copyrighted or just less optimized. Maybe they promote irrelevant keywords for content as an option. Almost any kind of sanctions include manual or penguin can provoke situation like this.

Secondary using tools like ahrefs, SEMRush, MoZ, Majestic we always need to keep in mind that it almost always based on their data and it can be not perfect for some website and niches. It's pretty hard to crawl and update the world wide internet. So maybe the links data is not relevant any more and he loosed almost all backlinks. Or not all keyword base are updated in this niche.

Also their is no direct connection beetween Ahrefs rank and traffic.

Ahrefs rank and DR - is mainly based on backlinks metrics. But traffic metrics in ahrefs is based on keyword volume/position. So there is no keywords in top 20 for example it's logic to count 0 traffic.

 

[American Trends]

There could be many reasons for this, one and simple logic can be backlinks that you have created are worthless, have absolutely no traffic or aren't diverting traffic to your web.

 

[set23]

I'm seeing sites that for example have 90,000+ backlinks, a RD of 36 (reasonable), over 900 referring domains, yet 22 organic keywords, but 0 organic traffic.

Ahrefs rank around the 2 million mark.

That seems strange - anybody any idea why it's so low with quite a decent amount of referring domains? Is it something that should raise a flag?

sorry you said ''over 900 referring domains'' and then RD of 36... but isn't the same thing?

Isnt RD and referr domains the same?

 

[ScreamingMidget]

sorry you said ''over 900 referring domains'' and then RD of 36... but isn't the same thing?

Isnt RD and referr domains the same?

Sorry, I got that the wrong way around... I meant DR.

 

[agent-x]

If the links are sidebar or blogroll links, people just don't click on those these days. I have links from sites that according to Alexa are in the top 500,000 websites and yet I get on average less than one click a day from these links. Doesn't mean they have no value for SEO.

The other thing to look for is if the anchor texts are over optimised, then the site won't rank for that keyword. That could be fixed

 

[ScreamingMidget]

If the links are sidebar or blogroll links, people just don't click on those these days. I have links from sites that according to Alexa are in the top 500,000 websites and yet I get on average less than one click a day from these links. Doesn't mean they have no value for SEO.

So you think they can still give a lot of authority, if you get a link back from them?

 

[tiiberius]

I'm seeing sites that for example have 90,000+ backlinks, a RD of 36 (reasonable), over 900 referring domains, yet 22 organic keywords, but 0 organic traffic.

Ahrefs rank around the 2 million mark.

That seems strange - anybody any idea why it's so low with quite a decent amount of referring domains? Is it something that should raise a flag?

Organic = search engines = must be indexed

If it's expired domain then there is no traffic because it hasn't been ranking for a while. Years possibly. It's possibly completely de-indexed and only hosts the default registrar page.

If it's live website...

Tools are never 100% accurate.

Try using a different service like SEMrush.

Also, manually check a few pages. Determine the primary keywords and find out where they are ranking for them. If the keywords have traffic and they are in the top 3 traffic must be present.

In case of expired domain, what I would do is get it and re-create important pages with new unique content. You should be acquiring traffic in a few weeks.

 

[jiggsaw]

900 referring domains but 90k+ backlinks. That's a HUGE sign of spam imo. Which would mean the DR is artificially inflated.

 

[ThopHayt]

Make sure you look at the links. With 90k links there is a fair chance it's been spammed in the past. Or that it was a cheap PBN at some point. Even for a new PBN you want a clean domain these days.

-ThopHayt

 

[ScreamingMidget]

Just to note, this isn't for an expired domain.

It's regarding getting links back from domains such as the one in OP.